by Laura Drewry
He could still see her standing at the far roulette table inside the Bellagio, cheering on her friend, who was being incredibly unimaginative by betting red twenty-one over and over again.
She looked great—Kate, not the friend—in those skintight jeans and black lacy tank top, which he later discovered had two rips in the right seam, both of which were held together by strategically placed safety pins. He’d watched her for a couple of minutes, fascinated by the way she moved and the sound of her laugh, before he finally went over to talk to her. They were both Canadian, both from B.C., and both single. She was gorgeous and funny and he’d been instantly smitten. Wasn’t a word he’d ever use outside his own head, but there really was no other way to accurately describe her effect on him.
Smitten. It had never happened before that night and it had never happened since.
“Okay,” Jessie said, waving her hand in a circular motion as if that would hurry him along. “And?”
“Her friends ditched and went home early, so she and I spent a few days together and ended up married.”
“Ended up married,” Jessie repeated, her voice flat. “You O’Donnells sure are a romantic lot. How long did it last?”
“The marriage?” Liam exhaled slowly. “Most of the night.”
“Most of the—” Jessie gaped. “One night? You were married less than a day? What are you—a Kardashian?”
“I know, all right? But I’d just turned twenty-one and I was still fighting to get my shot in the big leagues.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So I wasn’t moving to Vancouver, Jess. I had a career going in Detroit.”
“Ohhh,” she said, drawing the word out over a slow “you’re such an idiot” nod. “Right.”
Anyone else who talked to him that way probably would’ve wound up on the business end of his boot, but this was Jessie. She’d worked at the Buoys for so long they considered her more of a sister than an employee. Even when Liam, Ro, and Finn left, she’d stayed; she’d put up with the old man’s bullshit and black moods, she was the one who got him into AA, and she was, without question, the only reason the lodge had continued running as long as it had.
They owed her. It was that debt, on top of the debt he owed his brothers, that made him agree to stay at the Buoys. Growing up, Ro and Finn had been forced to pick up the slack every time Liam was off somewhere playing ball. Sure, they’d bitched about it, and you could bet your ass there’d been a few punches thrown, but they’d still done it.
And as much as Liam wanted the Buoys to reopen, he wasn’t ready to give up his career. Sure, he’d been out of a contract for over a year, and, sure, his arm wasn’t what it used to be, but his agent wasn’t trying to sell him as a starter anymore. He was just trying to get Liam a deal as a relief pitcher, but so far every nibble they got turned out to be a dead end. If—no, when—he got another offer, he’d be on the first Helijet out, debt or no debt.
Until that happened, though, he’d do his level best to get this place in running shape again, because at the end of the day, it was home. Always had been.
“Earth to Liam.” Brow raised, Jessie wiggled her fingers in a “come on come on come on” way. “Vancouver? Detroit? Let’s hear it.”
“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “I’d worked too damn hard to get where I was and I wasn’t about to change for her or anyone, especially when it was probably going to end in disaster anyway. I mean, shit, Jess, look what Mandy did to Ro, making him give up everything and trying to turn him into something he didn’t want to be. The guy’s as miserable as a guy can be and it’s all because he bent to whatever Mandy wanted, and if he didn’t, she cried until he finally gave in.”
“Hang on a second.” Jessie lifted her hand and squinted back at him as though trying to work out what he’d said. “You and Kate got married ten years ago, that’s what you said, right? Were Ro and Mandy even married by then?”
“Just.”
“So how in that screwed-up mush of a brain of yours did you think it was reasonable to use her as an example of what your ten-minute marriage might turn out like?”
Liam didn’t have a good answer for that, but if he didn’t say something quick, she’d probably figure him out.
“Finn and I knew Mandy wasn’t right the first time we met her. Shit, Ro’s the biggest carnivore this side of Medicine Hat, and she wouldn’t even allow meat on the table. What the hell? And then he traded in his truck for a MINI? I mean, come on.”
“I don’t see how any of that is Mandy’s fault. Maybe your brother did it of his own accord; maybe he was being considerate, did you ever think of that?” It only took a couple of seconds of Liam blinking back at her before she conceded. “Okay, that would have been completely unlike him, especially since he’d never driven anything smaller than a crew cab before that, but it’s not completely impossible.”
“Impossible or not, no way was I ever going to be that guy, so even though I knew it was stupid, I had to get out of there, away from her. I mean, jeez, Jessie, I was twenty-one, I had no business getting married!”
“God love you, Liam, but for such a nice guy, you can be a complete asshole, you know that?”
“Why? Because I didn’t want to give up what I’d worked for? Or because I didn’t want to leave a wife somewhere while I hit the road for seven or eight months of the year?”
“Don’t give me that crap; plenty of ball players make it work.”
“Mm-hmm. And plenty of them end up divorced, too.”
Jessie didn’t have to look at him like that to make him feel bad; he already knew he’d been a prick, but there was nothing he could do about it now except shrug.
“We hardly knew each other, so we probably would have ended up divorced anyway. I was just smarter about it than Ronan was, because I ended it before I had anything she could take half of.”
“Oh my God,” she cried. “Do you even hear yourself?”
With a sigh, he started to collect his tools, but Jessie stepped closer.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?”
“No.”
“The O’Donnell eye twitch doesn’t lie, buddy. Spill it.”
Shit. He tossed the hammer and pry bar into the crooked wooden toolbox—a beat-up piece of junk Finn had banged together in high school—then turned to face Jessie, but it took a couple of seconds before he could actually look her in the eye.
No point hiding this part anymore; it was bound to come out at some point anyway.
“I just left. Got up in the middle of the night, grabbed my stuff, and took off while she was sleeping.”
He tugged off his cap and scrubbed his hand across the top of his head, as though that would help scrape away the image of Kate lying in that bed wearing nothing but his Justin Verlander jersey, her dark hair splayed out as if a tornado had ripped through it, and her long, bare legs sticking out from under the blanket.
It had almost been enough to make him drop everything and crawl back in with her, and a few times over the years he’d wondered what would have happened if he’d done that. Hell, just thinking about it now made him want to kick himself.
“You left?” Jessie’s shocked croak dragged Liam out of that warm motel room and back to the damp chill of the cove. “Did you at least say goodbye?”
Slowly, painfully, Liam shook his head. “I left a note, told her I was sorry but it was the only way.”
He’d always expected that somehow time would ease how much that ate at him or that he would somehow forgive himself for being such a dick, but it had never happened, and the sound of Jessie clicking her tongue at him didn’t help.
“God almighty, Liam.”
“I know, okay? I know.”
“Did you at least give her anything in the divorce?”
“Like what?” He put his cap back on and laughed, dry and brittle. He’d been so broke back then that he couldn’t even afford a cheap ring for her, so he’d cut up a piece of the lacing from his old glove and tie
d that around her finger. “Hell, neither one of us could afford a lawyer, so I did the whole thing with one of those do-it-yourself kits.”
“And she didn’t contest it? Have you even talked to her since you left?”
“No.” He sighed again, shrugging. “I texted her once to get her address, and after that, if I needed her to sign anything, I just dropped it in the mail. Everything always came back right away, no problem, but there was never a note or message or anything like that.”
“So that was it? Seriously? Not a phone call or Christmas card? Nothing?”
“Nothing. I went my way and she went hers.”
“Did you ever apologize?”
“Yeah,” he grunted. “In the note I left.”
“Uh, yeah, no. That doesn’t count.” Jessie tucked her hands up inside the sleeves of her sweater and crossed her arms. “But, then again—and I’m not saying you’re any less of an asshole—I’m just thinking maybe if she never tried to contact you afterward, either, maybe she was as happy to be rid of you as you were to be rid of her.”
Yup, that’s pretty much what he’d thought, too, the only difference being that in the last ten years, he’d never once been happy about being rid of Kate; he’d simply done what needed to be done and moved on.
“And now here she is.” Jessie looked down at her boots, shaking her head. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns. Did you have any idea she was working for Foster?”
“If I did,” Liam grunted, “we wouldn’t be standing here right now. She was working at a lumberyard when I met her.”
“A lumberyard? Guess that was a step up from the cleaning job she mentioned.”
If Liam remembered right, that cleaning job she’d told him about involved hoard removal, so, yeah, anything had to be better than that.
“There’s not many people—men or women—who’d agree to stick around here after being dumped like that,” Jessie said. “She must be some kind of tough.”
Tough?
No, he mused. That’s not how he remembered Kate at all. The Kate he remembered was soft and smooth and tender, with hands that fit perfectly in his and whose biggest fault was being too sweet and believing he could give her what she wanted.
Jessie started to leave, then turned back. “Okay, obviously this is going to be awkward as hell for all of us, but she’s a warm body who, for some crazy reason, is willing to leave her cushy job on the mainland to work here, where the best thing we have to offer is enough salmon to meet her daily omega-three requirements.”
Liam started to nod, but Jessie wasn’t done.
“We can’t afford for you to piss her off, okay? So if that’s what’s going to happen, then do us all a favor and avoid her altogether.” She paused long enough to sigh and shake her head again. “Or here’s an idea: How about you man up, grow a pair, and go apologize to the girl for being such an asshole and for taking a decade to realize it?”
He started to snap back at her, to tell her the sarcasm wasn’t helping and that it hadn’t taken him ten years to realize it, that he’d known it before he’d even stepped out of the motel room. But Jessie had already rolled her eyes and was walking away, mumbling how it was about damn time they had a little more estrogen around the lodge.
“Jessie, wait!” By the time he caught up to her, she was halfway up the path. “You didn’t call Ro and Finn, did you?”
“Yeah…no,” she replied, her impatience coming through loud and clear. “In case you’ve missed it, I have better things to do than run around telling everyone what an idiot you are. Tell them yourself. And for God’s sake, turn your radio on so I don’t have to come out here and hunt you down all the time.”
No question, Finn would be more understanding about the whole thing; but after the number of times Liam had told his older brother what a huge mistake it had been for him to marry Mandy, he’d no doubt get that back in spades from Ro.
There was no way he could keep any of it from Finn when he got back tomorrow, but telling Ronan…yeah, that could wait. That could wait a long time, actually.
—
It was a little tight, but Kate managed to fit almost all her clothes into the three drawers under the bed in the narrow A-frame cabin. Her suitcase, now stashed behind the small square table in the living area, held the three things she’d have absolutely no use for here: the dress and shoes she’d arrived in and the old Verlander jersey Liam had left behind in Vegas. He’d loved that stupid thing, had gone on and on about how he’d been at the first game Verlander ever pitched and how he’d used all his beer money to buy it.
The only reason Kate still had it was that she’d been sleeping in it the night Liam took off, and it was amazingly comfortable, especially after ten years of washes. Sure, it was too big for her, but it wasn’t as if she wore it out in public, just around the house and sometimes to bed. If she’d had any idea she was heading into O’Donnell territory, though, she never would have brought it.
With her dress swapped out for a pair of faded jeans and a loose-fitting blue turtleneck, she quickly tugged her hair up into a knot, then stuffed her feet back into her gum boots. It wasn’t until she’d zipped her coat that she peered out the front window into the early-evening darkness and heard Walt’s words play back in her head.
“Hope you brought bear spray.”
Was he serious? It couldn’t be more than a couple of hundred meters between her cabin and the lodge, but the ground was covered in a thin layer of wet slippery snow, and who knew what was lurking out there, waiting to pounce the first time she slipped? Kate liked to consider herself pretty tough, but the first hint of a bear and she’d probably die of fright on the spot.
“Maybe they’re still hibernating,” she muttered, her hand resting on the doorknob. “It was a bumper berry season last year; it’s possible their bellies might still be full.”
In mid-April? Probably not, but it wasn’t as if she could stay in the cabin much longer; Jessie was waiting for her. So, as she stepped outside, she made sure to cough loudly and slam her door, because bears frightened easily, right?
“Sure,” she mumbled. “Bears might, but what about cougars?”
All righty, then.
She bolted for the lodge, slipping and sliding over the snow in her gum boots until she finally made it into the glow of the floodlight at the back door, then slowed almost to a stop until her breathing evened out. Inside the mudroom, she stripped out of her raincoat and boots, then padded through the kitchen to the lobby in her socks.
“Hey.” Jessie smiled from where she stood behind the registration desk, her dark toque-messed hair pulled back in a loose knot. “D’you get settled okay?”
“Yeah, I’m all set.”
“Good. I kind of rushed you through here earlier, so d’you want the grand tour before dinner?”
“Sure, that’d be great, thanks.”
On her first quick pass through the lobby, Kate couldn’t help but notice how cozy it seemed, but now that she had time to actually take it all in, it was more than just cozy. It was like someone’s home.
Unlike other hotels and lodges she’d been in, this one didn’t boast grand floral arrangements or fancy plush furniture. Instead, there were a couple of well-worn brown leather couches positioned around a chunky stump of a table, which sat in the middle of a braided burgundy area rug.
Opposite the table was a huge rock fireplace, which not only divided the lobby from what Jessie called the great room but also opened into that room, so it could be fed from either side.
The great room was filled with more comfortable-looking couches and chairs as well as two leather-padded rocking chairs.
“We never tried to keep anything matching or symmetrical in here,” Jessie said. “Guests seem to like it better if they can move the furniture around to suit their needs.”
She pointed toward the large card table near the window, the one with puzzle pieces scattered across it, where a rocking chair had been set up on one side and an overstuffed
armchair on the other. A huge flat-screen hung on the far wall, and yet very few pieces of furniture were turned toward it. Adjacent to that wall stood a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with a chaotic jumble of both fiction and non, movies, board games, even a couple of coloring books.
“Come on,” Jessie said. “I’ll show you the guest rooms.”
As they headed out of the great room, she waved toward the doorframe next to the kitchen, which led down a flight of stairs.
“The family quarters are down there. Nothing fancy, just bedrooms and a couple bathrooms. Once the season starts, we keep that door locked for obvious reasons.” They started up the stairs as Jessie waved her hand toward the huge windows near the front door. “There are three cabins out along the cove.”
“Yeah, I saw them earlier.”
“They each sleep four relatively comfortably, but we’ve had five or six people crammed in there a few times—the guests’ choice, not ours.” At the top of the stairs, she led Kate into the first room on the right. “And these rooms each sleep two, three if we’re desperate. We have a couple cots in the storage room, but, as you can see, there’s not much room in here for one.”
She was right on that. The huge king-sized bed took up most of the space, leaving just enough space to walk around it to the two chairs and bureau under the window. Each room had its own bathroom, but those weren’t overly spacious, either. What the rooms lacked in size, though, they made up for in spades with the view of the cove.
“Every guest room and cabin has a name,” Jessie explained, laughing lightly. “The cabins outside—Green, White, and Orange—are the colors of the Irish flag, and these rooms are counties.”
“Counties?”
“Mm-hmm.” She led Kate back into the hall and pointed at each door. “Clare, Cork, Meath, and Down.”
“Okay,” Kate murmured, repeating the names over and over in her head. “Hope I remember that.”
“Trust me, you will.” Turning, she pointed to the door behind her. “Storage room there, and this last room has the laundry facilities for the guests, and that’s it for up here. I forgot to mention it before, but the middle A-frame outside is the sweatbox. There’s a treadmill, exercise bike, weights…you know, all that, so help yourself if that’s your thing.”
